this is as old as conservatism is, to be fully direct about it.

Southern Democrats in the US told their supporters that Lincoln and the Republicans were going to use centralization of the government to take their slaves away. Lincoln had no plans to do that, and never implied he would.

But what did the conservative supporters do? They raided armouries and declared independence from the Union. Abolitionism was a splinter movement at the time, its supporters were radicals and in a minority. But, because the South demanded that they were fighting to preserve their right to own slaves, and because Northerners came to understand first-hand the extreme conditions enslaved peoples lived in, the Republicans became Abolitionists as the war progressed.

The easiest way to agitate a population towards your biases is to make up propaganda about your political adversaries. Tell your supporters the other side wants to force them into a religion that’s scary to them. Tell them the enemy wants to enslave them. Tell them the other way only leads to chaos. Your supporters will rush to do whatever you want them to. When I was a kid, right after 9/11 happened, it was using the threat of Islam and racist depictions of Arabic people to direct people towards joining into the military-industrial complex. Before I was born, it was the threat of Soviet Communism to direct people towards supporting imperialist projects and the capitalist system. In the time of my great grandfather, it was racist depictions of Jews and the threat of ‘Bolshevikism’ to direct Germans towards the Nazi party.

Today, it’s the threat of Chinese Communism, the threat of Antifa, the threat of Islam, and the threat of Authoritarianism.

It still could